Poppy Z. Brite - 1992 - Lost Souls (39 page)

 
          
Her
belly that cradled him, unborn. He wished he could be Christian’s hands. He
wished he could feel
Jessy’s
weight above him, her
skin slick as if with oil. He imagined Christian thrusting up into her, parting
her womb, nudging up against the fetus there. Me, he thought. In the womb, had
he been bathed with Christian’s semen? Had it nourished him along with the
blood of Jessy?

 
          
And
there in the womb, half-formed, had something in him known even then whose
child he was? Had he longed to be nourished by Zillah’s sperm instead of
Christian’s? Had something in him wanted his father? Was that why he had spent
the first fifteen years of his life alone, always alone, always searching for a
place he might belong—for a perfect love?

 
          
Well,
he had it now. Body and soul and all the realm between.

 
          
He
remembered the night outside the Sacred Yew, now a month past, and all that had
transpired on the cold sidewalk. The night of punishment and revelation. He had
awakened sometime past sunset the next evening—even then he was beginning to
get used to the hours his new family kept sleeping most of the day and howling
all night. He woke back at the trailer, in Christian’s bed. Zillah lay beside
him, his head turned slightly away, his hair making colored stripes on the
pillow. In slumber, Zillah’s face was almost innocent.

 
          
When
you could not see those eyes.

 
          
Father,
Nothing thought.

 
          
He
had slipped quietly out of bed, not wanting to wake Zillah yet. He had looked
at himself in the bathroom mirror, still able to meet his own eyes, and he had
told himself: For a week now you have been fucking your own father. His tongue
has been in your mouth more times than you could count. You’ve sucked him
off…you’ve swallowed stuff that could have been your brothers and sisters!

 
          
But
he could not disgust himself. He could not make himself ashamed. He knew these
were things he was supposed to feel, things the rational daylight world would expect
him to feel.

 
          
But
he could not force himself to feel them. In a world of night, in a world of
blood, what did such pallid rules matter?

 
          
He
wasn’t sure he could ever have felt the things expected of him in the normal
world, not even when he had been an unwilling part of it. Its morals had never
been his; its baubles of status had never hypnotized him with their false
glitter. He tried to imagine his friends back home making love with their
fathers: Julie humping her fastidious attorney dad, Laine sucking off his
hippie-throwback old man who grew stunted pot plants in his study and was
supposed to be a genius at computer language. The idea did not offend him; it
was sort of gross, because most of the fathers were not what Nothing would call
hot-looking, but he could not label it with words like wrong or bad.

 
          
He
wondered if he had ever known what those words meant. Were members of his race
born with some sort of amoral instinct that shielded them from the guilt of
killing to stay alive? If he had not been born with such an instinct, could he
have taken that first bite out of Laine’s throat?

 
          
Nothing
tried to imagine the circumstances that would lead, purely by coincidence, to a
half-breed vampire leaving home, hitchhiking more than two hundred miles, and
being picked up by the very member of his race who had fathered him fifteen
years before. He could not do it.

 
          
This
was not coincidence; this had all been meant to happen. A map of his life was
printed somewhere, and for a long time he had been wandering its boundaries,
hopelessly lost. Now he had found its pattern. That the map might be printed
all over with the legend Here There Be Monsters did not bother him in the
least.

 
          
His
bond to Zillah was also his bond to this world of blood and night. He knew that
now Zillah would not leave him, would not abandon him. He had faced Zillah down
once, and he could do it again. In a weird way, it seemed to make Zillah proud
of him.

 
          
Zillah
had wanted him from the beginning. There must have been some biological pull
between them. The seed returning to the
sower
. But
Zillah hadn’t known why. The sentiment might still have been revocable. The
pull might have weakened, even dissolved, when the next bottle of cheap wine
was gone. But when Christian spoke those words outside the club—those
terrifying, magical words, You’re Zillah’s son—the bond had become flesh.

 
          
No,
not just flesh. Blood. The bond was forged in blood, of course, his and
Zillah’s, and
Jessy’s
that had poured out of her.
Nothing was of Zillah’s blood, and Zillah would not let him go now, not in a
thousand years. They might live that long, might live a thousand years or more,
and still they would be together. He would ride the highways with Molochai,
Twig, Zillah, and now Christian, forever. They would drink and make wild love
and never grow old. And he would never have to be alone.

 
          
Nothing
smiled at the ceiling. Though he did not know it, there was a wantonness to his
smile that had not been there a month ago.

 
          
A
soft footfall made him look toward the bedroom door. A figure stood in the
doorway, a black shadow haloed by a thin line of silver light. Long wavy hair,
straight shoulders. A small slight figure that stood as if it might be seven
feet tall, massive and regal. Zillah.

 
          
“Come
here,” said Nothing. Zillah came to him and slipped under the cold sheets with
him. As Zillah’s arms tightened around him, Nothing heard himself say, “Daddy.”

 
          
Zillah
kissed his eyelids, his forehead, his lips. “Yes. That’s lovely. Call me that.”

 
          
“Daddy,”
Nothing whispered as Zillah unwound the sheets, kissed his throat, his chest,
the tender concave stretch of skin below his ribs.

 
          
“My
baby,” said Zillah, and bit him gently. Nothing felt the last tattered shreds
of his old life—the town, the desperately apathetic crowd at Skittle’s, the two
well-intentioned fools who had pretended to be his parents—tear loose and drift
away on the warm river of Zillah’s tongue.

 
          
On
the scent of blood, of herbs, of altars.

 
          
A
night for reflecting.

 
          
A
night for thinking of matters ordinarily left untouched, left half-buried in
the sludge of the unconscious. Some nights seem shaped by an unseen dark hand.
Some nights seem made for lying awake, eyes following the cracks and flyspecks
on the ceiling, or the dead leaves and flowers pinned there, or the painted
stars. Some nights seem made for plodding through the mind-sludge, poking at
swollen and corrupted things, then ruthlessly heaving them over and staring
them full in the face.

 
          
Some
nights are made for torture, or reflection, or the savoring of loneliness.

 
          
Zillah
lay draped around Nothing. To someone who lifted the tin roof off the trailer
and looked upon the two small figures tangled in the sheets, Zillah’s position
would have appeared both protective and possessive. He lay with his cheek
against Nothing’s smooth hair, and he thought, Mine. More than anything was
before, more than anything will ever be again, this is mine. My seed, my blood,
my soul.

 
          
In
town, a bad country-and-western band took the stage at the Sacred Yew.

 
          
Christian
wiped down the bar and tried not to listen to the mournful strains of the
Rickenbacker, tried to blot out lyrics like ‘This heart was made for
drinkin
’, not for
thinkin
’.” His
mind turned to Zillah and Nothing, to their obsessive incestuous passion for
each other. Well, he asked himself, what difference can it make? Who can it
hurt?

 
          
There
are so few of us, and if it stops two souls from being alone, then where is the
harm?

 
          
He
worried for Nothing because he knew Zillah was mad. Madder even than he had
been fifteen years ago at Mardi Gras. The green light in his eyes was crazier,
his passion for violence and pain more evident. But perhaps the whole race was
mad in one way or another. Surely years upon years of living on the fringes of
the world would drive anyone to madness. Zillah and the others—their madness
was that they had grown to love living as nomads, outlaws, murderers.

 
          
Their
madness made them happy. And as for Nothing, perhaps being loved by his mad,
beautiful father was better than being alone.

 
          
In
another part of town, out where the pines hung heavy and green, where the
October colors of the other trees flamed darkly in the night, where the kudzu
marked the passage of the road, Ghost lay curled in bed. He was aware of Steve
in the next room, sleeping the sleep of alcohol, sodden and dreamless. Steve
wasn’t drinking se much beer lately. He had started on Jim Beam instead.
Tonight he had begun by drinking it with tap water and ended up taking straight
slugs from the bottle, and by the time Ghost helped him stagger to bed, he had
put away a fifth of the stuff.

 
          
Steve
talked and talked. Laying blame. That bitch, he said. That fucking betraying
bitch.

 
          
And
that green-eyed motherfucker, I wonder how he’d smirk if somebody cut off his
balls …

 
          
Ghost
listened, saying “yeah” and “uh-huh’ at the appropriate places. But where was
the point in laying blame? Zillah had bewitched Ann. Ghost knew from his
grandmother that love-spells don’t work on people who don’t want them, and they
are surely the hardest kind of spells to undo once they are done. And as for
Nothing … well, Nothing was home after all, wasn’t he? Blood calls to blood. If
Nothing wanted to sleep every night in his father’s arms, then Ghost guessed
that was what he must do.

 
          
He
wrapped his arms around his pillow and wondered, What will come of all this?

 
          
Where
will all these lost souls go? But that was not the question he wanted to ask.
What would come, would come. He reached out with his mind and found Ann in the
dark somewhere, wandering by herself, searching for something that would only
hurt her if she found it.

 
          
Bewitched.
She could not feel his mind brushing hers, would not answer him. He closed his
eyes and tried to
will
himself to sleep. He’d been
crying a lot lately. But he didn’t want to cry alone in the dark.

 
          
As
Ghost began to dream, the inhabitants of the trailer on Violin Road congregated
in the tiny kitchen and greeted the new night with plastic cups of wine. At the
Sacred Yew, Christian watched the bar clock and counted off the hours until
closing time.

 
          
Night.

 
          
(Scratch)

 
          
(Pop!)

 
          
A
yellow-orange explosion in the dark. Steve lit a fat joint that had been rolled
from more of Terry’s
Popacatepetl
Purple. Sparks
showered down, flared like tiny nighttime suns among the clamp pine needles,
and died.

 
          
It
was Halloween night, and they were sitting in the tiny Civil War graveyard in
the woods behind their house. Ghost liked to come out here to smoke, to be
among the trees and lie on the thick carpet of pine needles. He liked the
gravestones that seemed to sprout like mushrooms from the forest floor, the
weathered crosses of wood and granite, the white lambs and winged death’s-heads
so worn away that they might have been natural outcroppings.

 
          
When
Steve sucked at the twisted cigarette, its light made his eyes into deep dark
pools, threw his sharp nose and chin into spooky shadowed relief. Ghost took
the joint and dragged deeply. The glow turned his hanging pale hair fiery,
suffused his eyes.